“Scum bags” seems unnecessarily harsh. Yes, domainers are a casualty of this pricing change; and that’s going to be frustrating to any domainer who uses the free tool.

But offering free services is never sustainable. People have to work to build and maintain those services. And if DomainTools has shifted its attention away from domainers toward a different target audience, then it may no longer be justifiable to offer a free service as a loss leader. I mean, if customers who use the free service are not expected to upgrade or pay for anything else, then those customers would simply cost the company money.

Arguably, there is some benefit to keeping domainer customers happy. But it’s understandable why this change would happen, simply as a result of responsibly managing bills and choosing to focus on a separate core audience.

Frustrating? Yes. But let’s reserve the word “scum bags” for people who do worse things than charge for services or raise prices.

People who relied on small business to grow and then S&(# on them and only care about huge corporations are scum bags. I’m fine with them not giving away the daily changes info for free but what they did with the domain tools pricing was horrible. I’ve NEVEr had a business raise prices / cut resources like they have and they knew exactly that it was harming small businesses.

Agree with you, Jeff, that the price hike on DomainTools last year was pretty bad. In that case, they were kicking loyal paying customers to the curb. This time, they’re just beginning to charge for a service that had been free. Which is understandable.

That earlier price increase was really severe and really sudden. And it greatly diminished transparency for the domain market, since fewer people now have access to historical information on domain ownership.